This link has been bookmarked by 13 people . It was first bookmarked on 05 Nov 2006, by someone privately.
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27 Aug 07
Carlos d'AndréaThe second internet goldrush is in full swing, and this time it's all about real people, creating, editing and showcasing their own lives and opinions. John Lanchester gets to grips with the virtual universe and Guardian writers interview the smartest and
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31 May 07
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14 May 07
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25 Apr 07
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06 Nov 06
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05 Nov 06
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04 Nov 06
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That means we had grown up with enough black-and-white TV for it to seem the norm, so that the new thing was an extraordinary marvel. People about 10 years younger than me don't know what I'm talking about. For them, TV was never black-and-white and colour pictures were never a miracle. Similarly, younger internet users who have never heard the whistling, chattering, hopeful-anxious sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. For them, increasingly, the net is something that is always available, has always been there, and can be accessed anywhere and at any time. Wireless modems, and the omnipresent internet they permit - the internet that is everywhere, like the air - still seem miraculous to me, but to 10-year-olds they seem utterly prosaic. People are growing up with the internet, and the internet is growing up with them. It is evolving. Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, "email's main function is as an instrument of torture". In civilian life, I increasingly notice that people don't actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past. No one could have predicted that, just as no one could have predicted the extraordinary, dizzying multiplying of the number of blogs being written. (I don't say read.) That number has been doubling every six months for the past three years: there are now, as of July 31, more than 50m blogs on the internet; 175,000 new blogs are created every day - that's two every second.
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That means we had grown up with enough black-and-white TV for it to seem the norm, so that the new thing was an extraordinary marvel. People about 10 years younger than me don't know what I'm talking about. For them, TV was never black-and-white and colour pictures were never a miracle. Similarly, younger internet users who have never heard the whistling, chattering, hopeful-anxious sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. For them, increasingly, the net is something that is always available, has always been there, and can be accessed anywhere and at any time. Wireless modems, and the omnipresent internet they permit - the internet that is everywhere, like the air - still seem miraculous to me, but to 10-year-olds they seem utterly prosaic. People are growing up with the internet, and the internet is growing up with them. It is evolving. Email was once a marvel of practicality and utility; people under the age of 25, though, never knew a time before it was broken by spam, and prefer to use instant messaging or texting. In the corporate world, as a publisher once told me, "email's main function is as an instrument of torture". In civilian life, I increasingly notice that people don't actually read their email; they sort of skim it, and get the gist, and any fine distinctions or crucial information are usually best communicated in some other way. So the heroic period of email is already in the past. No one could have predicted that, just as no one could have predicted the extraordinary, dizzying multiplying of the number of blogs being written. (I don't say read.) That number has been doubling every six months for the past three years: there are now, as of July 31, more than 50m blogs on the internet; 175,000 new blogs are created every day - that's two every second.
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